America’s anti-tax tradition

As we, as a nation, approach the fiscal cliff and watch the wrangling on Capitol Hill over who pays taxes, there’s a discouragingly familiar sound to all the debates. Is politics only about taxes?

It certainly seems that way. Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, in a recent New Yorker piece, says yes — at least since the 1970s.

But she traces the battle over who pays and what is taxed back to the Constitutional Convention. As the writers struggled over balancing power among three branches of government and the fractious 13 states, a struggle arose over representation. Southerners wanted their slaves counted as part of the population, so as to increase their representative power in the new Congress. But as a point of law, slaves were property not people. Northerners balked at counting slaves as people; Southerners balked at the idea of paying more taxes to have their slaves counted as people. The compromise hammered out was one of allowing only direct taxation — a concept never defined.

Since that dispute over taxing slaves, Americans have battled over who pays and what is taxed ever since. In 1894, a federal income tax was levied on Americans who made more than $4,000 a year. But the next year, the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was a direct tax, and therefore unconstitutional.The tax’s legality, the court said, rested on provisions to protect slave property, and had no bearing in contemporary America.

After more than 100 years of fighting over what should be taxed — real estate? property? income? — an income tax was levied in 1916. The wealthiest 15 percent paid taxes, and most Americans nothing at all. In 1921, the anti-tax movement took off and slowly American citizens morphed into American taxpayers. The concept of taxes as a pact — to provide mutual defense, public safety and services, in short civilization as we know it — rather than a burden, has been lost.

Lepore calls for renewal of that pact. If we can derive any message from the 2012 presidential election and its application to scaling the fiscal cliff, then it is that the American people have called for renewal of that pact, too.